… or Overcoming Your Fear of Repositories as the OTN Garage puts it! My colleagues Glynn Foster, Pete Dennis and I have put three articles on Oracle Tech Network that we hope will help you keep your Solaris 11 systems up to date. Here’s why these documents may be of interest to you administering Soalris 11.
Firstly Glynn published How to Update Oracle Solaris 11 Systems From Oracle Support Repositories. This covers the basic you will need to know to update your system.
Pete authored More Tips for Updating Your Oracle Solaris 11 System from the Oracle Support Repository. This article covers some more advanced usage. In particular Pete explains how package version locking and freezing work. This is important if you want to only update a subset of packages, or alternatively want to update all except a subset of packages. We have tied the main core OS components together to ensure that the core OS is always at a well tested level, this avoids the issues we have seen where customers have used ‘Dim Sum Patching‘ in the past.